But I knew, even then, that my degree would have served me better — or really, I would have served my degree better — if I had been older. So, although it seems surprising to me, maybe it was inevitable that at the beginning of this year, I suddenly wanted to return to education. I was on the cusp of turning 30 — much to the relief of my colleagues, who would refer to my twenty-something state with visible nausea — and while I don’t take age markers too seriously, the neatness of the beginning of a decade tends to make you wonder how the next 10 years might play out.
My unconscious mind had evidently been working on the question without me realising, because it came to me as a fully realised certainty: I want to become a psychotherapist. I had to work backwards from there (how?), but even as I determined what it entailed (five years of training; no clue how I’m going to pay), the conviction remained.
If you had told my undergraduate self that in a decade I would be attempting to balance a social life and a career as a journalist and novelist with a part-time degree, she would be looking for the punchline. But instead, I am remarkably energised. I don’t know how I’m going to make it work, but I know that I want to.